However, in the 19th century a curious change in trend began to take place. The “Great Sea Serpent” according to Hans Egede. Many of the stories referred to by the navigators spoke of monsters in the form of serpents, and in fact their tales were not so far-fetched since there is no lack of sea creatures with this appearance: from actual sea snakes to the tentacled arms of the giant squid to other more aberrant organisms like the pyrosome, a species of very long luminous sock composed of thousands of individuals. It is not surprising that ancient voyages through unknown and hostile oceans gave rise to all sorts of myths about sea beasts. We review below some classic cases and the science surrounding them. Although many of those monsters were definitively discarded with the advance of zoology, legends about others have endured almost to this day.Īnd yet, many of the monsters were not one hundred percent fantasy, but rather these cryptids -supposed animals, clearly non-existent- were born when human reasoning combined a rudimentary knowledge of nature with a strong dose of imagination. ![]() ![]() Sharing the pages with real animals were fantastical creatures that have never existed, but were passed along from one volume to the next because someone once said they had seen them. Since antiquity and during the Middle Ages, anyone opening one of the then popular bestiaries (illustrated volumes that described various animals) could find within the covers a mixture of reality and fiction.
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